I'm curious to see if this is really a strong play to look like a more global company when it comes to hosting data, since a lot of organizations are starting to prefer non-US based data centres thanks to the NSA revelations. I'd be curious to see how these data centres are connected, and how things like load balancing across geographic zones and other inter-geographical affected services would affect the compliance requirements for customers in each location.

Laurianne, IBM's 40 global data centers compares favorably to Verizon Terremark's 49 and CenturyLink Savvis' 50. The telcos had lots of data centers before cloud computing came along to support their network operations. I've never inspected a Verizon or CenturyLink data center to verify that the whole thing is dedicated to cloud computing. My guess is, it isn't. Nevertheless, they are my two best examples of global reach. Amazon Web Services lists seven regions in which it operates data centers around the world. Because Amazon has multiple "availability zones" in each center, think independent power and communications or a small, free standing center, I count each Amazon region as more than one data center but can't supply an exact comparison. Something like 16 or 18 is realistic, in my opinion.

"... as contrasted with the commoditized cloud model that emphasizes low costs, instead of business growth and innovation."

Seems like companies will only do this -- take on this risk -- if it lowers costs. They might also see the growth and innovation elements, wrapped in some kind of "agility" language, but won't the table stakes for any IT exec be lowering costs compared with the current option?

There's no doubt Google has made headway into businesses: Just 28 percent discourage or ban use of its productivity ­products, and 69 percent cite Google Apps' good or excellent ­mobility. But progress could still stall: 59 percent of nonusers ­distrust the security of Google's cloud. Its data privacy is an open question, and 37 percent worry about integration.